June 14th, 2009
“There’s no way they can move us,” the shopkeeper said. “After three years, they’re still not done with Phase 1. How will they ever get to Phase 2?” He chuckled, pointing at the neighborhood-sized shopping center being erected one block away.
Such is the precarious state of Kunming’s old city. Of the ancient walled city, once four kilometers across, only a single cross-shaped area formed by Confucian Temple Street and Guanghua Street has escaped demolition to date. Yet this tiny area is a treasure trove of pre-1949 Chinese architecture, from wooden shop fronts and stone courtyards to a pair of prewar tenements called the “Sister Buildings” that bend gracefully to the curving streets. Amazingly, most of the shopkeeper’s neighbors have lived here for their entire lives; tea shops and little restaurants continue to do business even as squads of shovel-toting laborers dig up the streets to lay new gas lines.
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July 31st, 2007
The new government building in Kunming, which strikes a great pagoda pose from a distance and serves as a great landmark. It’s even being used in real estate ads elsewhere in the city as a marker of prestige.
Capital of southwestern China’s Yunnan Province, Kunming is a fairly unassuming, extensively modernised city. No part of it seems to be bustling or teeming with activity, yet none of it’s deserted or windswept, either. While the downtown shows the classic traces of contemporary transformation — the Carrefour, the Kentucky Fried Chicken, the brightly lit pedestrian streets lined with outlet after outlet of the same national chains — it’s in Kunming’s suburbs that these changes seem more like a work-in-progress and less of a fait accompli.
A view of southern Kunming and the Dian Chi (lake) from the Xi Shan (West Hills). The elevated highway seems to have radically changed the lakefront- riding underneath one can’t help but notice a sense of decline in the adjacent properties, which though becoming increasingly decrepit, seem to have once been fairly sought-after retreats, with large lawns, and of course that now-lost view.
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